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Article: <5fsq7l$bs4@dfw-ixnews4.ix.netcom.com>
From: saquo@ix.netcom.com(Nancy )
Subject: Re: TUNGUSKA
Date: 8 Mar 1997 22:46:13 GMT
In article <5fpiss$2d5@news.sandia.gov> Kent Budge
writes:
> The heat of combustion of methane is something like 192
> kcal/mol. A kiloton is defined as 1e9 kcal. So it would take
> the combusion of 1.0e11 moles of methane to produce this
> explosion. Assuming liquid densities for the methane, that's
> over 400 million gallons of methane. This would fill a
> spherical storage tank 150 meters in diameter. If allowed to
> vent into the atmosphere, the cloud of gaseous methane would
> be 1.6 kilometers in diameter. This assumes no mixing with
> air, as would be required for optimum combustion; if mixed
> with air, the cloud is over three kilometers in diameter.
> That's an awful lot of methane.
> Kent Budge <"kgbudge,"@,sandia,.gov>
Yup. Hundreds of square miles of rotting grassland and swamp and mastodons, accumulating over a few thousand years, sound like a lot of methane gas too. I tried to find some info on landfills, why they have to be vented and what happens if they're NOT, but didn't find anything as yet. I know there is a capped landfill near my home turned into a bay-side park. It's vented. One has to check which way the wind blows before walking the trails along the bay there, else it smells like a shit house.